By Bob and Joy Schwabach
                                                                        

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	January 2003, Week 4 --By the Booklet
	Psst: Wanna print booklets without going nuts? Well you're in luck. ClickBook, one of the best print utilities of all time (computer time, that is) is out in a new version with some new tricks.
	Printing a booklet is so easy you'll want to do it for every list you have -- names and addresses, company health benefits, rules for using the library, mail procedures, recipes, music collections, whatever.
	Any time you go to the print menu in any application, one of your choices will be ClickBook. Select that and you then choose a template: to produce booklets, brochures, manuals, invitations, catalogs, menus, etc. The default choice is printing a booklet.
	Printing booklets is what this utility was been about from the beginning. New features in version 6 include more than 130 other layouts for items such as business cards, greeting cards, day planner pages, doorknob hangers, CD jewel case covers, stickers, and even photo albums. The utility instructions walk you through double-sided printing if your printer isn't already set up to do it. Page numbering, missing in previous versions, is now present.
	The utility of this utility, if you will, quickly exceeded its apparent utility. It automatically reduced and aligned any text or photo files we wanted to print. This produced pages with several photos or text pages on a single sheet of paper ready for folding or cutting. Single sheets of paper can have many pages of text or photos and be stored for archival purposes. Since the sheets can be printed double sided; one piece of paper can hold a lot of information.
	As we said earlier, booklets can be printed from almost any application. We called up a file of World War II speeches by P.G. Wodehouse and loaded it into Microsoft Word. PrintBook automatically generated a 5x8 inch booklet, reducing the text to fit and numbering each page. We put a bunch of children's drawings on a blank page in Word, one by one, and the utility printed a booklet of pictures, two to a page. Looked totally great!
	It frequently happens in business and schools that changes have to be made to an instruction manual or phone list or benefits book. The utility has a one-click button for removing or adding a page. If only small sections of a page are to be changed you can adjust the layout. A small and subtle touch in the ClickBook is "anti-shingling." When you print a booklet with more than a few pages the extra thickness forces pages progressively back from the leading edge, creating a sloping effect called "shingling" by printers. The program automatically corrects this by adjusting the printing of each page in tiny increments so the complete booklet will look normal when folded.
	ClickBook 6.0 is $50 from the maker, Blue Squirrel www.bluesquirrel.com, or $25 as an upgrade from earlier versions. A 15-day free trial can be downloaded from the web site. There is a Macintosh available for $50, or for $10 as an upgrade.
	More utilities: the cleanup crew
	On to another utility: This one is "Internet Cleanup," in a new Windows version from Aladdin Systems. It's designed to work with the market leading Internet Explorer browser from Microsoft and eliminates such supremely annoying Internet features such as flashing ads, popups and banners.
	The utility can also remove Spyware, Active X controls, tracking devices and unwanted cookies. Spyware is one of the insidious features of the Internet. Downloading some programs, or just visiting some sites or reading email can result in small spy programs being placed on your computer. These can send messages back to the originator, about your Internet usage or simply how often you use a certain program. The object would be to put you on a mailing list for certain products or just general junk mail. The spyware may also pester you to upgrade, which I consider almost the same as junk mail.
	For your own security the utility can be set to delete instant messages and chat room conversations, and can shred any deletion if you so desire. Shredding for a digital message means it is overwritten many times, making it impossible to resurrect later with "undelete" software. Only do this if you want, since accidental deletions that are shredded cannot be recovered.
	Aladdin Internet Cleanup 3.0 works on Windows 98 and up and is $30 from www.aladdinsys.com; upgrades are $15. This version does not work with the Netscape, Mozilla or Opera browsers; those users should get version 2.0.
	And still more utilities
	We're going to close by mentioning a new upgrade of "Undelete," version 3.0, that works with Windows XP; earlier versions work with previous versions of Windows.
	Undelete is much more powerful than Windows own undelete feature. It replaces the Windows "recycle bin" and can recover deleted files instantly, even if they were deleted from another computer on a network. It can even recover files that were emptied from the recycle bin, as long as they weren't overwritten. This can be a career saver.
	An overwritten file can only be recovered in fragments. The more times the file is overwritten the fewer fragments there are, until finally nothing is recognizable or recoverable. Sometimes you want that, and so this utility includes a "shredding" feature to make sure that deleted file can't be recovered. Undelete is $30 from www.undelete.com.
	NOTE: Readers can search four years of columns at the "On Computers" web site:  www.oncomp.com. You can e-mail Bob Schwabach at bobschwab@oncomp.com or bobschwab@aol.com.

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